So, I'm trying to follow through with my intentions, and make a mod for XCOM2 that adjusted the game so that battles are a little more drawn out, back and forth, and less controllable.

So far the ideas have been as follows.

*1. Adjust unit statistics, primarily health and armor values, to so that they are much harder to kill in a single round.

So far I have done this for the the player soldiers, and for the first few aliens on Legendary difficulty.

*2. Adjust the basic squad size, and enemy pod size.

So far this has been changed, with the player squad starting at 5 soldiers (improving to 7), and enemy pods having one extra unit in them.

*3. Adjust soldier stats and progression so they don't gain as significantly from rank, and have some random variation.

So far this has been changed, with rookies having somewhat randomised stats (health, movement, dodge, aim, hacking, will), and all classes gaining less at higher ranks than before, and with some random variation.

*4. Adjust loot drops so that more weapon mods and PCS drop, to account for greater squad rotation and death.

I've started looking at this, but haven't really done much on it.

*5. Adjust wound timers.

I've added in a few new breaks and made some adjustments, but this needs a bit of testing.

*6. Adjust mission timers top account for much longer fights.

I've not done this yet, but know how to do it easy enough.

7. Adjust AWC randomness by class, and perhaps allow the player limited choice.

This is beyond me at the moment and I've not looked at how other mods have tried to look at it.

8. Consider adding new classes, and making some class balance adjustments to skills.

This is not too hard to do, but down the line for me.

9. Look at other options for the strategy layer to feed back in to a more interesting tactical game.

10. AI adjust so that enemies can shoot when they discover you on your turn (like ambush mechanics).

So far the changes I have made I'm mostly happy with. They create more drawn out battles, make it more likely that my soldiers will get at least injured, and lessen the power of grenades and other skills, and give a little more importance to positioning and shooting.

As a result of the drawn out battles some enemies are significantly more annoying than before, which I consider to be a good thing. Sectiods are now much trickier, zombies are not ignorable, and so forth. I expect there will need to be a lot of balance done to the enemies given the fundamental change multi-round battles has. Single round items like mimic beacons and the like are naturally less valuable, healing is more useful, as are some of the other lesser used items that target specific weaknesses - where before you would just favour outright damage.

Max Engaged Enemies changed for all difficulties.Enemy Fallback chance increased.Enemies properly value their existing tile.Enemies throw grenades even just at one person.Deadeye buffed (cooldown 2, aim penalty 15%)Ranger Magentic and Beam swords buffed, in damage, crit damage, and shredding ability.Aliens gain range bonuses when shooting at closer ranges.Will skill gain is slightly less random.All classes skill gain values changed, and all now have some random element. Also, Rangers may now gain small amounts of dodge per level, grenadiers may gain armor at some levels, specialists may gain movement.Grenades don't snap to tiles.All enemies drop more loot.Wound tables finer than before.5 solders at start.Enemy health and armor values adjusted, health quite significantly.All enemy mission groups now larger, usually by a factor of 1.All rookies are Not Created Equal, and have random varience in health, mobility, will, hacking, and dodge.Squad size can go up to 7.

Next things to work on.

Enemy health stat adjustment on legendary, basic adjustment for other difficulties.Turn timer adjustments for missions.AWC and skill looked at for any potential changes.Any text updates needing as a result of above changes.

On the topic of healing, you'll probably need to think about increasing max healing. The best I ever saw was 8. At max level armor, that's less than half. With the nature of the single roll for hit and crit, at higher levels, when you get hit you are most likely crit, often doing 75% of health in a single shot, generally needing two of a possible 5 max healing charges on a heal spec'd specialist to "fix."

Yeah I'm keeping that stuff in mind, though I'm also partial to healing just not being that great, so you can only really afford to heal the guys who are about to die, and might lose some.

I'll probably adjust some of the armor utility items to make them more useful, though already the one that stops damage over time and the one that heals you are more useful.

Some other changes made, slowly working out a bit more of how the game and mod system comes together.

Loot tables changed from the borrowed solution of another modder to give what I wanted instead, all weapon and pcs drops are now 20-30% more likely, to account for the larger squad size and expected larger turnover.

Added in the ranger swords getting the ranger GTS upgrade for the moment, trying to see at what point rangers swords become too good or otherwise.

Noticed there's a variable for the PSi class for psi credit per kill? Didn't think they gained anything from kills, but maybe they do, will have to follow that one up.

Made some more changes to the NCE variables, to try and make soldiers a bit more diverse. Tweaked the enemy health values some more.

AWC skills and GTS training.How armor/shredding/pierce is used in a more interesting way, to make enemies require different tools and classes to kill optimially (fire grenades to large damage but have no pierce or shredding, gas grenades do moderate damage and pierce fully, normal grenades do lower damage and shred minorly, acid grenades do little damage but shred a lot. Sniper have built in pierce, etc, etc).